Our Mission

Family Stories

(In-Schools Program)

Sep 13,2011, 10:15 AM - 12:05 PM @ James Lick Middle School

We are really excited about working with you in our writing room! Since
it is the beginning of the year, we wanted to do a writing assignment
that would engage the students and help us get to know them better. For
this assignment, students will be writing personal essays that
accompany their family tree projects. They can chose from the following
prompts: 1) Write a personal essay about a family story (ex. humorous,
sad, scary, embarrassing, etc.) 2) Write a personal essay about an
experience you personally had 3) Write a personal essay about how a
member(s) of your family came to the United States (explain
who/what/when/where/why/how?). We are focusing on incorporating
figurative language and imagery in our writing and these strategies
should be apparent in the students’ essays.

While in the writing
center for the first time, students will share their first drafts of
these stories in small groups to get peer feedback and support from the
tutors. We would like the tutors to facilitate the share-out and peer
feedback and then use their own expertise to provide students with
ideas and suggestions for improvement. The writing should focus on plot
development, figurative language and vivid imagery and may include
dialogue, suspense and any other literary techniques. After our initial
tutoring session, students will revise their essays, then they will
meet individually with tutors in the writing room to get more specific
feedback on proper grammar, spelling, punctuation and structure for
their final essay to be published.

For grading purposes, we have
provided a state-generated narrative writing rubric. We will use this
rubric to assess students’ writing in detail.

We look forward to your support and thank you in advance for working with our students.